This December, Polyphony Digital is releasing their new sequel to their worldwide famous racing game franchise, “Gran Turismo”. It will be released on the PlayStation 3, and so far it looks perfect. The graphic looks astonishingly beautiful and realistic, and the control mechanism is also improved. It looks very promising to the fans of this franchise, but Polyphony Digital had one more huge surprise about this game.

Polyphony Digital announced that they will be installing a new feature to their brand new game, called “Course Maker”. It is a mobile tie-in app that allows you to create your own tracks in the game. Pelophony announced “will add the possibility to generate a track by capturing the GPS coordinate data of a mobile app while you are driving that course. This GPS-generated tracks will be available in the game as playable content.” Meaning we can create our completely original tracks by using GPS in the real world. The roads you run in real life with a car will be saved and analyzed in the mobile application, allowing you to design and create tracks using real roads in the GPS.

Potential Strengths
– Next Generation gaming mechanism, introducing the realworld into the gaming world throughout a mobile device
– Infinite number of original tracks can be created, always keeping the players entertained
– Players can be motivated to create their own orignal tracks, and can influence more people to drive more often, to make their new tracks using their GPS application

Potential Limitations
– Because this application is under development, maybe the whole system won’t work as they planned, creating a huge crash. It can destroy game datas, which will disappoint players and fans hugely
– Even though it says they can use real tracks to make their original tracks in the game, there will be some limitations in either the graphic or the design, with only GPS it will probably not be possible to create a very realistic and beautiful atmosphere, and there will be some problems and glitches
– Person requires to drive in real life to capture the coordinates of the tracks in real life, so people which cannot drive may not be able to play this feature

Discussion Questions
1. What are the details of this feature, because of the point being too abroad and unrealistic, I suffered to fully understand it. I would want a detailed explanation of how they are actually building this application, and how it works in our terms, when building our original tracks from captured coordinates from the GPS.
2. Are they going to build in additional features for ones that cannot drive? If they will then how?